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Tagging System Updates and Discussion.

Hi everyone! We’ve deployed a few new site features, and we’d like to inform you all about the changes.

Two of the changes involve the tag system.
First, we have implemented a global tag restrictions system. This means that there are certain tags that will not be allowed to be added to a submission by anyone other than the artist and Weasyl staff. Staff has compiled a list of terms that are considered offensive, profane, and are not helpful to classifying or categorizing the submission.
Also, staff is open to suggestions on adding tags to the blacklist. Please post any suggestions in the comment section of this thread. Do keep in mind that not every suggestion is guaranteed a spot on the blacklist; but the current list is by no means exhaustive.

The second change to the tag system is only available to the site directors and administrators, but we want everyone to be aware that the change has indeed been made. Originally, when a user’s tagging privileges were deemed to require removal, it was a complicated process for all staff involved and because of that, it would take a long time to actually accomplish the action. Now, every site director and administrator has the ability to check a box, hit the “submit” button, and the user can no longer tag other users’ work. We hope that by making the process faster, situations involving the mass tagging of works with harassing or otherwise unwarranted tags can be avoided.

These two changes are only the first of several changes that are planned to be implemented. Keep your eyes open for more tagging system updates!

The third and final change that we’ve deployed involves the site newsposts. We have officially ceased our use of Tumblr as a method of communicating with users. While Tumblr was extremely helpful in the early stages of Weasyl, we now have more efficient ways of posting, updating, and documenting the news that used to be posted concurrently on Tumblr and the site itself. All of the past and future news posts regarding Weasyl can be found on the dedicated announcements page.

That’s all we have for now, but stayed tuned for Weasyl news because we have a lot of cool features on the way!
One I am very excited about!

Happy Weasyling.

I have a secret.​
A dark, furry secret with big teeth.​
Less a secret, really - more a wolf.​

I forget, did you guys ever add a feature where people get notifications when someone adds tags to their work? Because that seems like a pretty essential part of cracking down on troll tagging. If trolls can add tags without anyone being automatically alerted to it, they can go a long time without being caught.

Also, something I've noticed a lot recently is artists mis-tagging their own work due to not understanding how tags work on this site. Like, they still try to just separate every word with spaces, so you get stuff like "friendship, is, little, magic, my, pony". It might be nice to have a way for someone (maybe a second tier of user who has elevated tagging privileges? didn't we use to have a group of users called "ferrets" who were somewhere between regular users and mods?) to remove existing tags to fix incidents like that.

I forget, did you guys ever add a feature where people get notifications when someone adds tags to their work? Because that seems like a pretty essential part of cracking down on troll tagging. If trolls can add tags without anyone being automatically alerted to it, they can go a long time without being caught.

Also, something I've noticed a lot recently is artists mis-tagging their own work due to not understanding how tags work on this site. Like, they still try to just separate every word with spaces, so you get stuff like "friendship, is, little, magic, my, pony". It might be nice to have a way for someone (maybe a second tier of user who has elevated tagging privileges? didn't we use to have a group of users called "ferrets" who were somewhere between regular users and mods?) to remove existing tags to fix incidents like that.

Tagging change notification has been a feature for quite some time. I can't recall when exactly it was implemented, I could have a dig through the old site updates if you'd like to know specifically when tag notifications was added in.

The ferret group and idea has been retired for the time as we don't currently have the manpower and whatnot to get it working the way we intended, but we may revisit the idea in the future to help us with tagging accuracy, etc.

The submission page does currently have a blurb about correct tagging with underscores so you don't get things like "friendship, is, little, magic, my, pony" (reusing your example as it's perfect), and we do have a tagging help page, but our help pages could use some updates. We'll see if we can think of ways to get the word out there on how users should be using the tag system. Thank you!

"Staff has compiled a list of terms that are considered offensive, profane, and are not helpful to classifying or categorizing the submission.

"Also, staff is open to suggestions on adding tags to the blacklist. Please post any suggestions in the comment section of this thread."

Okay, may we please see that list? It seems somewhat non-intuitive to ask users to come up with suggestions that you may or may not already have included.

Anyway, this is a step in the right direction, and thank you very much for that! However, as much as you're trying to have it both ways with the community tagging, there are artists who will simply never accept it, and some sort of opt-out or disabling feature might be the only way to keep them from leaving. If the artists themselves are tagging their own work either offensively or poorly (doing the "friendship, is, little, magic, my, pony" thing, etc.) then maybe people can report them for that and mods can step in if it's that big a deal. Otherwise, unless this unseen blacklist is really comprehensive, I'm afraid letting the community at large modify artists' tags in any form just hits too raw a nerve for many of them.

So, did you ever post that list? Because no one is going to make helpful suggestions when they don't know what's on it. And if you did, why isn't there an edit to say where said list it? Because I'm not going to stress myself out looking for a list, when I honestly am torn if I even want to come back to this site. Inaction of staff is something I can get anywhere, so why fight with a UI that I don't care for?

We apologize for not posting the list sooner. We had intended to post it earlier, but it seems there was a mix-up in communication among staff members.

The following is the list of tags on the blacklist. Please be aware that some of these terms are very offensive, and their inclusion on the list is not in any way a reflection of the views of staff members. They have been put under a spoiler tag so that anyone who wishes to avoid exposure to these terms may do so.

We've also pushed live a user restriction tagging feature. If you go to Settings -> Community Tagging Restrictions, you can add tags to a list that will block other users from adding those tags to your work. We'll talk more about this in the next Site Update, but since this is a Tag Restriction based thread, it's worthy of mentioning here.

I really enjoy the community tag feature! Thanks for adding that. But in the future I'd like to see a setting that disallows any users other than the original uploader to add tags at all. I think it would just cut out troll tagging completely.